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Minix have always fascinated me: how it's more modular, smaller, safer and even self-healing. It makes sense to think those are qualities all systems should hav

by htor 11y ago

Minix have always fascinated me: how it's more modular, smaller, safer and even self-healing. It makes sense to think those are qualities all systems should have, embedded or not. I wonder if the more popular desktop OSes are ever going to change their monolithic architectures into something similar and adopt these ideas. At this point it seems unlikely because it's all about speed and flashy features, not so much reliability and modularity. It would be a huge amount of work to change the underlying architecture of some existing million-lines-of-code monster - and that costs a lot of money - but the benefits of having a microkernel could also outweigh that in the future.

zvrba 11y ago
> I wonder if the more popular desktop OSes are ever going to change their monolithic architectures into something similar and adopt these ideas. Windows graphics stack from Win7 (or maybe already Vista?) can recover from driver crashes. I experienced it a couple of times (VERY rarely though), and it worked. The screen blinked, all applications survived and I could just continue doing whatever I was doing. No need to reboot or even log out.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Experienced it too, I just realize how 'normal' it felt even though not long ago everything would have gone down. <notgratefulenoughme/>
pjmlp 11y ago
Windows and Mac OS X have already to a certain extent, as they follow a hybrid model. Same thing with your phone OS, given how their sandbox models work. Only GNU/Linux and *BSD keep pushing the monolith UNIX kernel design.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  I'm not sure if XNU really reaps any benefits from its arrangement. It's not so much a hybrid kernel as much as it is a chimera kernel - the OSF Mach component is used to define the low-level constructs like tasks, threads, VMM, IPC/ports (XPC sitting on top of it), system clock, host info and so forth, but no real reliability gains to speak of.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Well it is a matter where Apple teams decide to invest their resources. The architecture is there.

by htor 11y ago

zvrba 11y ago

> I wonder if the more popular desktop OSes are ever going to change their monolithic architectures into something similar and adopt these ideas. Windows graphics stack from Win7 (or maybe already Vista?) can recover from driver crashes. I experienced it a couple of times (VERY rarely though), and it worked. The screen blinked, all applications survived and I could just continue doing whatever I was doing. No need to reboot or even log out.

agumonkey 11y ago
Experienced it too, I just realize how 'normal' it felt even though not long ago everything would have gone down. <notgratefulenoughme/>

pjmlp 11y ago

Windows and Mac OS X have already to a certain extent, as they follow a hybrid model. Same thing with your phone OS, given how their sandbox models work. Only GNU/Linux and *BSD keep pushing the monolith UNIX kernel design.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
I'm not sure if XNU really reaps any benefits from its arrangement. It's not so much a hybrid kernel as much as it is a chimera kernel - the OSF Mach component is used to define the low-level constructs like tasks, threads, VMM, IPC/ports (XPC sitting on top of it), system clock, host info and so forth, but no real reliability gains to speak of.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Well it is a matter where Apple teams decide to invest their resources. The architecture is there.